Loanwords and Paris Syndrome: Common Law, Fancy Theory, and the Anglo-Saxon Basilect

This is a response to the Posner-Garner-Wark-Bloom view of hermeneutics. It is an elite Continental psycholinguistic analysis of the Norman invasion as a force of civilization and its discontents, and is only available with premium subscriptions to very expensive journals.

MJ You have written that “We need a new language to describe emergent forms of commodity economy. It’s not neo anything or post anything. It’s not late capitalism or cognitive capitalism. Modifiers won’t do. It’s based on an ontological mutation: the historical production of the category of information.” Given your analysis, does the concept of class struggle retain any relevance today? What form does it take in the context of an immaterial, digital landscape?

MK To talk about the biopower of postfordist neoliberal late capitalism seems to me a complete failure of language. Just sticking some modifiers on the old terms doesn’t really capture the strangeness of the times. It helps to imagine that there was one other past mutation in the commodity economy. It shifted from the enclosure of the commons as private property, to the industrial production of the thing as private property. There’s a leap in the form of abstraction there. Not just land and its produce but labor and its produce can be commodified, rationalized, quantified, and so on. Perhaps what we are living through is a second great mutation in the commodity form, from product to information. In Marx’s day, steam and iron were the technical means by which industrialization could proceed. In our time, the integrated circuit is driving a whole new means to capture value, and no longer just from actual work. The commodification of play is another side to this new form of the commodity economy, as I tried to argue in my book Gamer Theory. The question would be then whether new kinds of class relations emerge out of making information private property. Are there new haves and have-nots? Not that this class division over information replaces those over land and industry, but is rather layered on top of them, perhaps even controlling them.

This is an article about where we draw the line. Where do we draw the line? Oh, and poor people are completely fucked over and everyone knows it. I actually think compassionate conservatism sounds pretty good in theory. I'm very conservative. Now watch this drive.

This article examines the outrageous claim by critical textualists that the Holy Roman Empire [was] neither 1) holy, 2) Roman, nor 3) an empire. By applying a very objective interpretation of these factors, and interpreting the words as they were understood at the time, this research conclusively shows that the much-maligned study of Byzantine law can help identify areas of potential improvement in efficient adjudication.

This is an article about lacunar discourse, difference and repetition, American individualism, moving through walls, the academy, and the panopticon - and how you've got green eyes, oh, you've got grey eyes, oh, you've got blue eyes - and I've never seen anyone quite like you before.

And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.

The hacienda must be built.

All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.

This article explores theories of cognitive dissonance, indeterminacy, and weak typing in languages. It adopts an influential model from recent procedural digital art, and explores theories of "default rules" in contract and governance, the empty set in programming languages, art history, and legal realisms. The author argues that a computational jurisprudence dualism with a space for play should be a categorical imperative in social systems design.

Piaget-Malabou-Butler-Pinker-Haraway contra Larkin-Eraserhead: Jurisprudence, AI Safety, and the Computational Son of Man

Philip Larkin wrote:They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf.Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.

This is an article about grid plasticity. It covers trying to be better about empathy and maybe even trying veganism, and not fighting in front of the kids. The author argues that good parenting is its own reward and systems should acknowledge that, and that anxiety and a scarcity mindset doesn't get anyone anywhere.

This is an article about what to do with your life. It generalizes the Posnerian concept of Bluebook-as-hypertrophy to law and society at large, discusses signal-noise problems, and applies machine learning heuristic algorithms to higher-level emergent phenomena such as cancer, AIDS, and the poverty-industrial complex.

Symposium on Hacking v. Defaults: On Conceiving "Degenerate Art" After The Republic, and Counterpoint in Bach

Plato wrote:Now there is an absurdity saying that harmony is discord or is composed of elements which are still in a state of discord. But what he probably meant was, that, harmony is composed of differing notes of higher or lower pitch which disagreed once, but are now reconciled by the art of music; for if the higher and lower notes still disagreed, there could be there could be no harmony-clearly not. For harmony is a symphony, and symphony is an agreement; but an agreement of disagreements while they disagree there cannot be; you cannot harmonize that which disagrees. In like manner rhythm is compounded of elements short and long, once differing and now-in accord; which accordance, as in the former instance, medicine, so in all these other cases, music implants, making love and unison to grow up among them; and thus music, too, is concerned with the principles of love in their application to harmony and rhythm. Again, in the essential nature of harmony and rhythm there is no difficulty in discerning love which has not yet become double. But when you want to use them in actual life, either in the composition of songs or in the correct performance of airs or metres composed already, which latter is called education, then the difficulty begins, and the good artist is needed. Then the old tale has to be repeated of fair and heavenly love -the love of Urania the fair and heavenly muse, and of the duty of accepting the temperate, and those who are as yet intemperate only that they may become temperate, and of preserving their love; and again, of the vulgar Polyhymnia, who must be used with circumspection that the pleasure be enjoyed, but may not generate licentiousness; just as in my own art it is a great matter so to regulate the desires of the epicure that he may gratify his tastes without the attendant evil of disease. Whence I infer that in music, in medicine, in all other things human as which as divine, both loves ought to be noted as far as may be, for they are both present.

This article argues against a feudal model of massive debt for licenses to earn a living, and for Renaissance careers in law in the post-lex mercatoria era.

Bergsonisme and Post-Positivism in Law: If You're Drunk Under a Lamppost and Can't Find Your Keys, Maybe You Shouldn't Be Driving (Efficient? I'm Wasted)

This is an article about how I really am getting to appreciate the Brian Leiter blog and want to post Althusser-Arendt-Habermas-Sloterdijk on neo-Kantians, and various Western Marxist material, but comments are disabled. Seems biochauvinist, reactionary, and inefficient to me. Tear down this wall

After Bergson spoke for thirty minutes, Einstein made a terse two-minute remark, ending with this damning sentence: “Hence there is no philosopher’s time; there is only a psychological time different from the time of the physicist.”

This is an article about how I'm just going to sit here reading Habermas and pretend I don't hear you. Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

> Instead of boring us> With geography> Oh! oh! sacred Charlemagne> Sacred Charlemagne!>> He had only to deal [with]> Battles and hunting> We would not be forced> To go to class every day>> We must learn to count> And do a lot of dictations> We must learn to count> And do a lot of dictations> Oh! oh! sacred Charlemagne> Sacred Charlemagne!>> Past participle> 4 and 4 makes 8> Lesson of French> Of mathematics> That of: That of - Homework: Homework> Sacred sacred sacred sacred> sacred Charlemagne!

A Theodicy of Renaissance Technologies (I’d Rather Have Had No Tail and No Flies)

This is an article about geometry, pattern recognition, winning the Veblen Prize, and latency arbitrage.

an article on Jim Simons wrote:Despite, or perhaps because of, the high level of public interest in him, he has always shunned the limelight, and interviews are rare. In explanation of his secretive nature, he quoted Benjamin the Donkey from George Orwell’s Animal Farm: ”God gave me a tail to keep off the flies. But I’d rather have had no tail and no flies.”